Journal-World reporters Shaun Hittle and Ian Cummings have attended the Lawrence Police Department's 2013 Citizens' Academy twice per week for the past month. On Wednesdays and Fridays, they highlight a few things they learned from the night before. This week's post recounts the eighth and final night of the course.

On patrol: the traffic stop

I saw a minivan weaving, swerving, speeding, and I decided to pull it over and check it out.

I followed the steps in order, as I'd been trained. I pulled my patrol car up within about a car-length of the van and unfastened my seat belt, so I could get out fast. When I hit the blue and red lights, the van hit the gas, so I had to race to keep up. We swerved around a curve before the driver of the van gave in and pulled over to the side of the road.

Officer Guile, riding shotgun, reminded me to park at an angle behind the van and "power it up" with our spotlight. Guile lives and breathes this kind of police work, and even after more than 10 years on the force, he says patrol is where he wants to be. As I stepped out of the car, I remembered his advice: keep your flashlight in your left hand; leave your dominant right hand free to reach for your gun.

Now, I didn't have a gun, because this was Citizens' Academy. We practiced traffic stops Tuesday night, driving Lawrence Police Department patrol cars at Clinton Lake Adult Sports Complex. Officers pretended to be drunk and disorderly drivers, and we tried pulling them over after some coaching from Officers Josh Guile and David Ernst.

If you've been following our "dispatches" from Citizens' Academy, you'll note a familiar theme: it's not as easy as it looks. As I learned by doing the exercise myself and following my classmates as they went through it, there are a lot of hazards to keep in mind at once.

Hazards of the job

In December, two Topeka police officers were shot and killed while approaching a suspect in a car, and in the Academy we had just heard the story of a former Lawrence police officer whose career was ended by an auto accident during a traffic stop.

In 2011,126 police officers nationwide were killed by gunfire, auto accidents, and intentional vehicular assault. As I saw when I caught up to the minivan, there is just no way of knowing what you are dealing with when you pull over a vehicle, especially on a dark night.

Parking the patrol car at an angle behind the van, I left the nose sticking out into the road to push traffic away from us. This also put the patrol car's engine block between me and the van, in case someone in there decided to take a shot at me as I stepped out. With the patrol car's spotlight on the van's rear windows, I could see there were at least two people inside.

I needed to watch that van. But I also needed to watch the traffic going by behind me, especially as I stepped into the road and around the nose of my car. As I walked up alongside the van, I used the flashlight to check out the interior. When I reached the window, I remembered to keep my face back from the door, so it didn't hit me in the face if the driver pushed it open.

Watch the hands and keep them talking

"Good evening; I'm Officer Cummings," I said. "You want to turn the radio down, please, and let me see your license and registration?"

The driver was acting drunk and gave me a fake ID first before handing me the real one. His buddy in the passenger seat was busy throwing up out the window. I asked the driver where he was coming from, and he said the name of a local strip club.

"Excellent," I said. "That's great."

It made no difference to me what these guys did for fun; my concern was keeping them occupied with answering questions and keeping their hands where I could see them. The patter keeps us all busy, and I didn't notice anything suspicious in the car, apart from the fact that these guys had been drinking.

The passenger still had his hand in the pocket of his sweatshirt, though, and I didn't like that. I told him to put his hands where I could see them, which he did, but he also lurched toward me through the window as if to throw up on my shoes.

Officer Guile and I decided to let them go, in the interest of time, even though each time we pulled these guys over their behavior seemed to get worse. Drunk is one thing, but other times they got rowdy and filmed us with their phones, or put on phony Russian accents and claimed they were terrified of being arrested and made to disappear. It got to the point where I thought of asking Guile to let me borrow his Taser for a minute.

No excuses in Citizens' Academy

At the end of the exercise, the play-acting officers in the van told me I did a pretty good job of talking my way through the stop, but also that I missed a few things.

For instance, I was so busy chatting with the driver about strip clubs and checking his license, watching two pairs hands and looking for traffic behind me that I didn't see the pistol the driver had tucked in the corner of the dashboard and the bags of cocaine sitting plainly in the passenger's cup holder.

On the other hand, the passenger said, it's a good thing I told him to get his hands out of his pockets, because he had a pistol in there, too.

I kicked myself over the missed guns and dope as I climbed back into the patrol car. It was disappointing. There are just so many unpredictable variables in any given traffic stop, and a lot happens quickly in real time.

I once fantasized about leaving my reporter's notebook behind and becoming a homicide detective. But on my last night of Citizens' Academy, I decided I'd be very lucky if they let me drive a squad car.

To see Shaun Hittle's Day 7 post "Raylan Givens would be embarrassed," click here.

I was dead before I even reached for my gun. And so was my partner.

It was a sobering moment Tuesday night at Day 7 of the Citizen's Police Academy as I stepped up as the first volunteer in a simulated shooting exercise.

After just having watched several episodes of the TV show "Justified," featuring rogue U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, I made the valiant decision to go first.

Lawrence police Capt. Bill Corey directed the simulation, and handed me a fake handgun while he set up the scenario on a large computer screen. There would be a police vehicle stop, I was told, and I would be the backup officer. On the screen, my partner approached a car, and a woman was asked to step out of the vehicle.

As I affected my best Raylen Givens swagger, I tried to think how Raylen would act. He'd be aggressive, but a perfect shot, I figured, ready to save the day. Would he even bother to take up a proper shooting stance, or just fling from the hip? Would he try to verbally de-escalate the situation, or just go for the gun?

None of that mattered. In this scenario, my partner and I were dead faster than I could form answers to those questions.

See, all that thinking, along with a second passenger who exited the vehicle, distracted me long enough for the woman to pull a gun and shoot both me and my partner. I didn't even have time to raise my weapon.

And that was the point. In the heat of the moment, decision-making is compromised. It's not even really decision-making as much as it is reacting.

Thankfully, for the citizens of Lawrence, I'm writing about this and not out there on the streets reacting.

But here's a video from fellow academy member J. Taylor, who kept his eye on the hands of a suspect reaching for a second weapon during an exercise:

And here's me on my second and more successful try with the simulator:

Use of force

With the story of a disgruntled and homicidal ex-police officer who's been shooting officers in California dominating national headlines, it was apt that Day 7 of the Citizen's Academy centered on officer use of force.

We were treated Tuesday to a frank discussion about the challenges officer face when deciding to use force.

Fortunately, in Lawrence I don't remember an instance (I've been here since 2008), where an officer has had to fire a weapon.

But police officers are trained to do so, Corey told us, equipped with a Critical Incident Team, or the Lawrence version of a SWAT team.

More likely, though, is an officer having to wrestle down a suspect, or pull a Taser.

Taser usage has become more common in the country during the past few years, and many of LPD officers are equipped with the yellow guns.

The reality is that the guns are pulled and not used much more often than used. It reminded me of a story we did a few years back about Tasers.

I'll never forget the quote from the officer we interviewed for the story: "Oh yeah, they (criminals) know the yellow gun."

According to that article, in the two and a half years since 2008, when the LPD got its first round of Tasers, officers used the yellow gun just 17 times in more than 300,000 police calls.

It just reinforced what the officers told us all night: It's much easier to sweet talk a suspect than use force.

That was clear to us a few weeks back in class when we watched a video of three suspects assaulting LPD officer John Evinger during a traffic stop in 2011. The video — which I don't have to share here — showed how quickly it can happen, and how dangerous the job is. Because of injuries to his eye, Evinger was forced to retire.

Journal-World reporters Shaun Hittle and Ian Cummings are attending the Lawrence Police Department's 2013 Citizens' Academy twice per week for the next month. On Wednesdays and Fridays, they'll highlight a few things they learned from the night before.

Crime scene investigation is not as easy as it looks on television.

Just taking your own fingerprint off of an aluminum can, as we learned in an exercise on Day 6 of Citizens' Police Academy, can be infuriatingly difficult. The tape sticks to all the wrong edges, the black powder gets everywhere, and you may end up with nothing but a smudgy blob. That doesn't happen to David Caruso on "CSI: Miami."

But, as Lawrence detectives Randy Glidewell and David Axman showed us, that's only the beginning of how messy real-life police work can be. At any given crime scene, investigators can expect to deal with blood spatter, teeth marks, bodily fluids, bad fingerprints and huge piles of dead flies. Our hands-on exercises Thursday night were thankfully limited to more routine types of evidence, and some of the more disgusting photos we looked at are not included here.

We did get our hands dirty, a little, in the aforementioned fingerprinting. The study of footprints provided other work, as we tried taking evidence-grade photographs from four angles and made casts of the prints with a mixture of dental stone and water.

The whole practice of forensic investigation, as we learned, is based on Locard's Exchange Principle, which says that a perpetrator of a crime always carries away traces of the victim. The opposite is also true, that victims take away traces of the perpetrator.

That principle leads investigators to examine all kinds of gory material. When criminals try to clean the blood from a crime scene, detectives can use a chemical called luminol, or Bluestar, to make it appear in the dark. They will use ultraviolet light to find, and run DNA tests on, semen left on a bed sheet. They will study the life cycle of houseflies to interpret the piles of maggots and the swarming flies around a man who's been hanging in an attic for 10 hot summer days.

Some perpetrators leave more traces than others. Because fingerprints are made in part by oils on the skin, which are controlled by hormones, children don't normally leave behind visible fingerprints. A nervous adult criminal, on the other hand, wiping off his sweaty forehead before touching things, may leave the best prints of all.

To preserve the more difficult fingerprints, investigators will sometimes coat them in a mist of vaporized Super Glue. The glue holds oils and amino acids in place to allow investigators to make several attempts at pulling the print without destroying it.

The department's mobile crime scene investigation truck has a Super Glue machine designed just for that purpose, and we had the chance to inspect it ourselves.

In my own exercise with fingerprinting, I could have used the help of that machine. After brushing on too much black power and smoothing tape over irregular corners, I pulled the tape off and squinted at my own badly-rendered fingerprint. I doubted I could convict myself. It was some consolation to learn that fingerprints only successfully identify suspects about 6 percent of the time.

Walking out of Thursday night's class, we could see Locard's Principle at work among us. We took away with us, from Day 6, ink-stained thumbs and a new understanding of forensic science. We left behind shoe prints in slowly-drying plaster casts, which we will examine when we return Tuesday.

In the meantime I noted the titles of some important texts on crime scene investigation that we saw in class, so I will have some homework to do over the weekend.

To see Shaun Hittle's Day 5 post, The murder of Onzie Branch, click here.

If they'd kept their mouths shut, Damon McCray would've gotten away with murder.

But as we learned in Day 5 of the Citizen's Police Academy, people, even when it means selling out their lovers and friends, talk.

Lawrence Police Sgt. Mike Pattrick walked us through the investigation of the August 1996 murder of Onzie Branch, a Topeka gang member.

Branch was shot when he was outside what is now the Magic Lounge, which back then was Langston's nightclub. It's the bar that's tucked behind the McDonald's on 23rd Street.

With hundreds of witnesses coming out of the club at closing time, someone peered out from behind a van and shot Branch, striking him in the head. Branch bled out on his way to the hospital.

The two other gang members riding with Branch that day, however, were not cooperative, and Pattrick said it took police five hours to positively identify the two, who initially gave police aliases. Stuck with uncooperative victims, police had to resort to a variety of investigative tactics, including staking out Branch's Topeka funeral.

The break in the case came when a confidential informant strapped on a wire for police, and headed straight into gang headquarters. "That one made me nervous," Pattrick said.

But the informant came back with a name, Damon McCray, and from there, police interviewed McCray's girlfriend, Shanee Blue, who eventually told police McCray confessed to her and asked her to lie about where he was the night of the murder.

One of McCray's friends, who drove McCray away shortly after the shooting, also said McCray admitted to the murder. Add in a fingerprint police found on the van where McCray braced himself before shooting Branch, and it was enough to convict him of murder.

But had everyone just kept silent, there would've been no conviction, Patrrick said.

The case was eventually overturned on appeal, but McCray was charged again and later pleaded guilty to lesser charges. He was released from prison in 2010, but soon went back for a drug crime. He's currently on parole and living in McPherson County.

About murder

Several times throughout the academy so far, police and even Chief Tarik Khatib have spoken with pride about their 100 percent homicide clearance rate.

Records prior to the 1980s are a little spotty, but every murder in Lawrence in the past several decades has been solved, though the family of one victim argues that's not the case in a murder from the late 1970s.

Knocking on wood, Lawrence has been fortunate in the past few years, with no recorded homicides in the city since the 2008. As a crime buff, I've taken particular interest in murders in Lawrence, and in 2010, we compiled the list of murders in the past decade. Since 2000, the city has seen 19 murders, all of which have led to convictions.

804 W. 24th St. in the spotlight again

It struck me as ironic that this past weekend, there was another gun-related arrest at 804 W. 24th St. Though the location has changed hands numerous times over the years (anyone remember NiteOwls, the failed "clothing optional" club from the early 1990s?), crime has been a constant at that spot, which was most recently Taste Lounge, before switching to Magic Lounge last year.

On Sunday, police were patrolling the Magic parking lot and spotted a gun partially hidden under the seat of a car, waited for the owner to come out of the club, and arrested convicted felon Dion M. Jones.

For a fun read, and to get a better sense of how police were able to arrest Jones, check out the federal indictment here.


• Day Four: robbery, homicide and crimes against children
• Day Three: Gangs, gun and peyote
• Day Two: Reports from the field
• Training Day

Journal-World reporters Shaun Hittle and Ian Cummings are attending the Lawrence Police Department's 2013 Citizens' Academy twice per week for the next month. On Wednesdays and Fridays, they'll highlight a few things they learned from the night before.

We ate meat lasagna while examining a photo of the exit wound a shotgun blast left in a Lawrence man’s face.

Even those with the strongest intestinal fortitude had second thoughts about going back to the buffet for a second helping. But it was really good lasagna, so we put the gore out of our minds and forged ahead. Lesson number one on day four of Citizens’ Academy: mentally separating blood from tomato sauce is a key skill for robbery/homicide detectives in the Lawrence Police Department’s investigation division.

But some things, we learned, are worse than murder.

Crimes against children

A detective told us to take a notepad and write down our most recent sexual experience. He wanted us to detail everything: date, time, where it was, who we were with and exactly what we did. As a class, we hesitated to pick up our pens and pencils. Imagine writing all of that down. Now, imagine reciting those details in an open courtroom for a judge, several attorneys and whoever else might be there. Imagine you are 5 years old, and you’ve been abused by a trusted relative.

Lance Flachsbarth, a detective who spent time in juvenile investigations, explained some of the techniques he’s used to interview children in this difficult situation. He talked about breaking the ice, giving a young child time to think and avoiding leading questions. He broke down for us the psychology of different types of child molesters and pedophiles. Pedophiles, we learned, are people who are attracted to children, and child molesters are people who commit sexual assaults against children. Sometimes those are the same, but not always.

The most dangerous kinds of offenders, Flachsbarth said, are criminals who are willing to assault anyone who is available to them, including children, the elderly and people who are disabled. These are the ones most likely to kill their victims to avoid detection.

Now, imagine eating another helping of lasagna after hearing that.

Robbery/Homicide

In the robbery/homicide portion of our class, detectives Jack Cross and M.T. Brown challenged us to solve two well-known Lawrence crimes.

One was a 1996 robbery of a Sonic restaurant and the other was the 2002 double murder of George “Pete” Wallace and Wyona Chandlee. Of course, the cases had already been solved, and our task was merely to guess the right answers based on evidence police found at the crime scenes.

In the Sonic robbery, police arrived at the restaurant chain’s 3201 W. Sixth location on Aug. 12, 1996, to find that two men with handguns had locked several employees in a walk-in cooler and escaped with thousands of dollars in cash. One of the robbers, according to witnesses, had answered the store’s phone in just the same way an employee would.

In the 2002 murder case, police found Wallace and Chandlee, both 71, of Lawrence, on July 11 in their house at 1530 Learnard Ave., lying next to each other on the carpet in the living room. Both had been shot twice in the head and the house had been ransacked. A bag of groceries remained unpacked nearby, with the receipt dated the day before.

The detectives led us beyond the crime scene tape and through the basic steps of an investigation. There are a lot of them, but here are some of the main points:

• Secure the crime scene. Preserve and photograph footprints, blood or other evidence.
• Interview witnesses. In a homicide, relatives and friends of victims are often the most valuable informants.
• Get information out. If you have a description of a suspect, circulate it among other officers immediately.
• Establish a timeline. Where have the victims been over the past few days?
• Look for security cameras in the area that might have captured images of the suspects.
• Research similar crimes in the area, in case there is a pattern.

We started shouting out theories and the detectives awarded us a “Super Sleuth” certificate for each right answer. After some hours, we solved the crimes all over again. Two Kansas University students, short on money for bills, were convicted of the Sonic robbery. One was a former employee of another Sonic restaurant.

Damien C. Lewis, a recent parolee from a Kansas prison, was convicted of the double murder. Police said Wallace and Chandlee surprised Lewis while he was burglarizing their home, and he killed them to avoid being identified.

We shuffled out, mentally numb and emotionally scarred. If much of our education was lighthearted and fun up to this point, our rookie class had now graduated to the darker territories of law enforcement.

Next week, we enter a course on major investigations.

To see Shaun Hittle’s post Day Three: Gangs, guns and peyote, click here.

Last night, my fellow Citizen's Academy attendees were able to visit a place very few people ever step foot in: the Lawrence Police Department's evidence room, tucked away above the county's courtrooms.

It wasn't what we saw that initially caught our attention. The second you enter, the pungent smell of marijuana hits the nose, a by-product of all the drugs confiscated and later stored by local law enforcement.

As the LPD's two evidence room officers talked to us, we were sandwiched between old rifles, nefarious-looking duffle bags and huge flat screen televisions. By necessity, the officers have gotten a little creative with the 55,000 square feet they have, which used to be a basketball court when the building housed the jail. Plywood planks littered the rafters, stacked with old evidence that officers just can't yet dispose of, in case of appeals.

I'd love to show you, but sorry, no photos allowed in the evidence room.

The rest of the night we were treated to presentations about drugs and street gangs.

Some of the more interesting tidbits we picked up:
• The Kansas Drug Tax Stamp: For forward-thinking drug dealers, Kansas offers drug tax stamps, allowing those who profit from the illegal drug trade to pay taxes on their sales. It sounds a little bizarre that someone would stop by a state office, admit to being a drug dealer, and then agree to pay taxes on their criminal enterprise. Here's a little explainer from the Kansas Department of Revenue.

• Buyer beware: Aided by its white, powdery appearance, it's not uncommon for drug dealers to dilute cocaine before distribution. It's referred to as "stepping on it," and basically includes drug dealers adding in other substances to cocaine to add weight and make the most of the substance, sales-wise. One common ingredient? Niacin, which has a similar appearance as powdered cocaine. The internet is filled with formulas for how this is done. Officers told us that this is often done at various stages, leaving the buyer with a watered-down substance, or "stepped on" product.

• Funniest quote from Officer Shannon Riggs, who's been involved in the LPD's drug unit: When discussing "tips" police receive about illegal drugs, offered that they come from a variety of sources, "including angry spouses."

• While it's not like Kansas City, or even Topeka, police do see gang activity in Lawrence. Police monitor such activity in a variety of ways, such as spotting and identifying gang graffiti. Though a few years ago, one prominent example, highlighted by veteran LPD Det. Mike McAtee, was the 1997 killing of David Eugene Walker by Lafayette Cosby, a case McAtee worked. Searching the LJWorld archives also found this 1996 gang-related shooting in Lawrence.

Journal-World reporters Shaun Hittle and Ian Cummings are attending the Lawrence Police Department's 2013 Citizens' Academy twice per week for the next month. On Wednesdays and Fridays, they'll highlight a few things they learned from the night before.

About five minutes into our second Citizens' Academy class, I decided to tell the captain I was dropping out. I didn’t sign up for this and I wasn’t cut out for it.

It's not that I was afraid of hitting the streets with Lawrence’s Finest. I assumed high-speed car chases, stakeouts and robberies in progress were all possibilities for our Citizens’ Academy class, and I was ready for it. Or so I believed.

But Thursday night we talked about paperwork. Hours and hours of paperwork. Incredible quantities of paperwork that add up to hundreds of thousands of written reports a year. As it turns out, a huge part of policing is writing down names, addresses and descriptions of the daily incidents and reported crimes that officers respond to every day.

Not to mention writing tickets. It made my hands cramp up just to hear them talk about it.

This discouraged me as a prospective police recruit, which I wasn’t (I had to be reminded repeatedly that this was not the actual police academy) but I soon learned there were reasons for all of it.

Almost all of those reports eventually find their way to the department’s website, along with a lot of other information, and that can actually be pretty useful.

Officer Jim Welsh and Sgt. Adam Heffley gave us a tour of the website and showed us some of the ways the department has wrangled all the information to make it useful to the public, beyond the department’s own need to keep track of things.

For example, all of the information goes to creating a set of cool-looking, constantly-updated public maps that show if my neighborhood is a “hot spot” for crime (it is) and make for some entertaining web browsing. Officer Welsh took some time to show us all the different combinations of maps, with different crimes and different time periods going back years.

And elsewhere on the website, we saw regularly updated pages showing what police around the city were doing and who had a warrant out for their arrest. You might be surprised to find yourself here. All of those reports the police take down for crimes and car accidents are available free to the public online.

Now, I was starting to come around to this kind of police work. Any of us could check out crime patterns and figure out which parts of town were the most dangerous. Much of this was actually useful to me professionally.

Others weren't as thrilled. Some of our classmates were surprised and unhappy to learn that their names, addresses, phone numbers and driver’s license numbers are published online in each report if they happened to be the victim or witness of a crime, or even a car accident. We had a long talk about privacy and the dangers of identity theft.

It's the law, our police officer instructors said. Kansas, like most states, has laws guaranteeing open access to these kinds of public records. As my classmates grew more annoyed, I slouched down in my seat and tried to become invisible. As a reporter, those kinds of laws make my existence possible.

We took a break to eat the rest of the pizza and cookies the department had provided us with, and checked out some (almost) real-time and interactive online policing. The officers showed off their “48 Hours of Calls” feature, which lists all of the calls police have responded to in the past two days. Our instructors only sounded a little like they were bragging when they noted it is the third most popular Lawrence city government web page. Take that, public works.

And they make sure to note report-writing time on the call list, just so you know they are working in those cars and not just sleeping.

We talked about radios, and in-car video cameras, and Tasers. How often do police use those, we asked? As it happens, a report describing the incident is posted online each time, and there are seven such instances listed for 2011. You can find that, as well as a wealth of numbers and policies of the department, under the “About Us” directory.

We didn’t have time to look at everything on the police department’s website, but you can see for yourself. They have videos posted here and you can follow them on Facebook here.

Oh, and if you want to make a complaint — or have a compliment — about a police officer, you can send it directly to Sgt. Heffley here.

I told the captain I would continue with the academy, but only on a few conditions. I work alone, I told him, I don't do paperwork, and I solve crimes my way. He was kind enough to say I could come back next week.

To see Shaun Hittle's Day One post, click here.

Journal-World reporters Shaun Hittle and Ian Cummings are attending the Lawrence Police Department's 2013 Citizen's Academy twice per week for the next month. On Wednesdays and Fridays, they'll highlight a few things they learned from the night before.

Day One: By the end of the first hour, half the group was broken, torn down into little pieces by our superiors, who quickly weeded out those who wouldn't last the grueling twice-per-week classroom sessions of the Lawrence Police Department's Citizen's Academy.

Many didn't even survive the catered pre-class dinner.

OK, that's all a lie. We weren't becoming cops, and no one would be pushing us to physical and mental exhaustion. In truth, we'd be learning about police work in a well-heated, friendly classroom environment while munching on sandwiches.

Most of our two dozen or so fellow classmates were just regular Lawrence residents, hoping to learn more about police work, social workers, retirees, and college students looking for a new perspective.

Lawrence Police Chief Tarik Khatib, though, didn't coddle the crew. While hitting on a wide range of topics — everything from drunken driving arrests to murder investigations — his point was clear: Police work is serious business.

Class attendees were treated to police dash camera, high-speed chase videos, highlighting the often times dangerous work of Lawrence officers, as well as nationally reported police shootouts, some featured at the end of this post.

But one video quieted the room.

Khatib showed excerpts from a taped interview conducted by Lawrence police with a man, now in prison, for repeatedly sexually assaulting a teenage family member.

The film was grainy and the dialogue casual, lacking the television police show drama confession environment. Instead, the officers tried to sympathize with the man, using years of training experience.

Often, the best police approach when interviewing child sexual offenders is not an aggressive, antagonistic style, Khatib explained.

Officers instead tried to be sympathetic and understanding.

What the man did was understandable, police said. The girl looked much older than 13, they concluded.

It worked, and elicited a confession later used to help convict the man.

The clip was stomach-turning and horrifying. But real. And highlighted the difficult police work the public never gets to see.

For my money, I learned more in those five minutes than in a lifetime of watching police shows.